Thought Leaders in Corporate Innovation: John Deschner, Chief Innovation Officer of TBWA/Chiat/Day (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Coming back to the micro, I want to probe two topics. One is your internal innovation strategy. The other is your external innovation strategy. Let’s start with internal strategy. I’ll explain to you what I’m looking to understand based on what you said so far. There’s all this stuff going on.

There are different platforms and ad units. Even within the platform, there are different types of ways you can engage with the audience. There is a tremendous opportunity for creativity and innovation using technology and designing interactive programs within your technology constrains.

How do you keep track of all the different things that are happening? Which ones need to be institutionalized? What we do in the technology industry often is, if something happens in some part of the organization and it looks really interesting, it goes from being a tight experiment to being institutionalized somehow, and often productized.

Your business is a bit different but certainly institutionalization opportunities are bound to happen within your organization as well. How do you manage that process-wise?

John Deschner: There’s a more fundamental question which is, “Do you have the people with the curiosity and expertise to be able to execute something like that effectively?” Above that, do you have a way to purposely experiment? If it works, you can institutionalize it and if it doesn’t, walk away with some lessons on what you messed up.

From that standpoint, a core internal innovation in the services industry is a lot about transformation, whether that’s the same people with new skills, new people, or new frameworks that you can put the same skills into but get a different outcome. There’s that side of it. It’s simply staying on top of different platforms, units, and behaviors on that platform. The secret weapon for creative agencies is that the platforms all have a staggering amount of money compared to ad agencies. They’re dying to have us create into their products.

Having media agencies’ buying opportunities is great, but if you don’t have a strategy or idea that fits it, you end up with not terribly interesting results. A few years ago, I had some interesting opportunities with Target. We were talking about moving a campaign to 100% YouTube in terms of the core assets. We found that, by reaching out to Google, they were super excited to support us and even help fund things sometimes. That’s my standard drill. I’m routinely meeting with people from YouTube, Google, Facebook, and Instagram.

If you let those people in and let them help you craft your strategies and ideas, you get a huge amount of value out of them. We just did something with YouTube – a six-second exercise – that they funded with a bunch of creative agencies. It gave us an opportunity to use some stuff at Sundance. The nice thing about that is we get to play with some new tools. We’re not doing it with client dollars. We’re doing it with our own time and creative energy, so people can get a chance to be famous in their own right. We get the chance to develop some expertise in a really low-risk environment.

I found that the more you have an open door for the platforms, the more value you get out of them. They’re really happy to come in and teach us anything, support us, and give us hardware and software expertise. That’s how we stay on top of things. My CCO here is great about pushing creatives by saying, “Do whatever you’re going to do, but I also want to see an idea using director mix. I want to see an idea using Facebook Live.”

Sramana Mitra: You use all the platform vendors to educate you on what’s new on their platform and what are the possibilities and powers of those platforms. Then you bring that into your creatives and task them to come up with creative ideas on how to use those platforms and those types of constraints.

John Deschner: All the platforms do roadshows. The roadshows are a great way to get a basic understanding. When I was at an agency called Deutsch in LA, I continued to invite them in. We have somebody from Google who sits in our office one day a week. We have a really close partnership with Reddit. We have a preferred data partnership with LinkedIn. All those things give us ways to exploit the platforms that we, otherwise, wouldn’t have if we just used what was publicly available.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Corporate Innovation: John Deschner, Chief Innovation Officer of TBWA/Chiat/Day
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